I have very scraggly facial hair - it grows very patchily above my jawline (i.e. it's mostly neckbeard) and it looks terrible, so I shave daily. I have an electric shaver with a self-cleaning dock station which was a gift from my parents. My facial hair grows in various directions which makes shaving it a pain. I have to run the shaver over it in different directions, and run my fingers ahead of the shaver to pull the stubble up so the shaver will catch and trim it.
Shaving takes me about two or three minutes each morning, right before I shower. After 24 hours I will have very noticeable rough stubble which I find unpleasant, hence shaving daily. Curiously, I've found that it seems to take pretty much at least 22 hours for it to be the right length for the shaver to be maximally effective. If I shave late one day (say 1pm) and then early the next day (say 8am) I find that it doesn't shave effectively, and I will have rough stubble again much sooner than if I'd shaved at 8am the previous day too.
I've used a safety razor a few times in the past which I found did give me a smoother shave (skin felt very smooth, instead of slightly rough like it does normally), but it took ages of faffing about with the shaving cream and washing the razor and everything and is just not nearly worth the benefit, unless I am doing something very fancy. I haven't experimented with this method much at all.
OK, OK, it's not the weightiest of topics, and it's not rocket science. But I searched the site for "shaving" and "razor" and didn't see where it had been previously addressed.
I had a beard for nearly 30 years, but have been shaving again the last 6. I have always (since a brief experimental period in high school) used an electric razor for shaving. So did my daddy and his daddy before him, back through history.. wait, that can't be right. But my daddy and his daddy did, anyway.
I can shave with my electric in about 45 seconds, or maybe twice that if I'm trying to do a great job. What on earth do men see with wet shaves? Assuming they don't find the process inherently rewarding, the only argument I've heard is that you can get a closer shave. Which brings me to rationality.
Why does one want a close shave? Beard grows continuously throughout the day and night. Let's take as a guess that after two hours, beard growth will transform a very close wet shave into hair length immediately after an electric shave. Assuming it is the ratio of hair length that determines the relative utility of two different beard configurations, the advantage of the closer shave falls throughout the day. The ratio would be 2.00 after four hours, 1.50 after six hours, etc. If wet shaving takes something like 10 minutes, if desired one could do a second electric shave in the men's room late in the afternoon and come out with less stubble for the vast majority of the day with less total time invested.
If there is some particular moment at which the least possible beard growth is desirable, for instance for a photo shoot, then I can see the advantage of the closest possible shave. A date is another possibility, though there is anecdotal evidence that some women prefer a hint of stubble to a smooth baby face.
But with those rare exceptions, the goal isn't to have zero stubble. It's to have stubble that's less long.
Similar arguments pertain to various sorts of housecleaning. Since whatever you're cleaning starts getting dirty again immediately, putting lots of effort into extraordinary levels of cleanliness seems to have little value unless you inherently value that moment of extraordinary cleanliness.